Unmarried 35-year-old woman reflects on her adventurous life of fun, travel and serial cohabitation

I found an interesting article featuring a 35-year-old woman who is alarmed that her approach to life has left her in debt and single, with a gap-filled resume of short-term jobs. I thought it might be useful for young women to read this, and consider whether making “rash” decisions and being “adventurous” works out.

I feel like a ghost. I’m a 35-year-old woman, and I have nothing to show for it. My 20s and early 30s have been a twisting crisscross of moves all over the West Coast, a couple of brief stints abroad, multiple jobs in a mediocre role with no real upward track. I was also the poster child for serial monogamy. My most hopeful and longest lasting relationship (three and a half years, whoopee) ended two years ago. We moved to a new town (my fourth new city), created a home together, and then nose-dived into a traumatic breakup that launched me to my fifth and current city and who-knows-what-number job.

Rash decisions, adventure, exploring…. and lots of debt:

For all these years of quick changes and rash decisions, which I once rationalized as adventurous, exploratory, and living an “original life,” I have nothing to show for it. I have no wealth, and I’m now saddled with enough debt from all of my moves, poor decisions, and lack of career drive that I may never be able to retire. I have no career milestones and don’t care for my line of work all that much anyway, but now it’s my lifeline, as I only have enough savings to buy a hotel room for two nights.

No STEM degree, which means she doesn’t like to study hard things that can be tested against the real world for correctness:

I used to consider myself creative — a good writer, poetic, passionate, curious. Now, after many years of demanding yet uninspiring jobs, multiple heartbreaks, move after move, financial woes, I’m quite frankly exhausted.

Surprised by aging and poor health:

Also, within the past year I’ve had a breast-cancer scare and required surgery on my uterus due to a fertility issue. On top of that, I’m 35 and every gyno and women’s-health website this side of the Mississippi is telling me my fertility is dropping faster than a piano falling out of the sky. Now I’m looking into freezing my eggs, adding to my never-ending financial burden, in hopes of possibly making something of this haunted house and having a family someday with a no-named man.

She’s still trying to be the sexpot 25-year-old she used to be:

I’m dating. I’m working out and working hard. Listening to music I enjoy and loving my cat. Calling my mom…. I’m drinking too much… And with men I date, I feel pressure to make something of the relationship too soon (move in, get married, “I have to have kids in a couple of years”; fun times!). All the while still trying to be the sexpot 25-year-old I thought I was until what seemed like a moment ago.

But her plan hasn’t worked out:

I used to think I was the one who had it all figured out. Adventurous life in the city! Traveling the world! Making memories! Now I feel incredibly hollow. And foolish. How can I make a future for myself that I can get excited about out of these wasted years? What reserves or identity can I draw from when I feel like I’ve accrued nothing up to this point with my life choices?

Well, I’ve known women like this, and I think we’re going to see more and more women like this as the society becomes more secular and feminist. I want to say something about whether she is sincere about wanting to get married and have children, and what women should do to avoid ending up like her.

Do women today understand male nature and marriage?

This woman’s demonstrated life plan is that she chose whatever made her feel good from age 18-35+, and now wants to enter into a marriage some time after age 35. And what does marriage mean to her? Has she prioritized entering the traditional roles of wife and mother? Don’t listen to her words. Look at her actions. Her actions show that marriage and children were of NO importance to her. And her current approach to getting married and having kids is the same as ever – work out in order to look hot, and try to coerce a man who signs up for recreational sex with no commitment into becoming a man who makes a life-long commitment to provide for her and her children (which is the opposite of what he signed up for). She wants marriage now for the same reason that she’s wanted anything: for fun, thrills, adventure and to keep up with her girlfriends who are already married.

What kind of man should she have been pursuing from age 18 to 35, if she really wanted marriage and children? Well, the first thing to realize is that not all men want marriage. And the next thing to realize is that women who are serious about marriage need to focus ONLY on men who want to marry. All the men that the women quoted above wanted in her youth didn’t want to marry. They wanted premarital recreational sex with her, and that was fine with her – she chose them, and disregarded the men who were interested in marriage.

A man who was interested in marrying her would have:

….told her no to sex before marriage (because the more sexual partners a woman has, the less happy she will be in marriage, and the more unstable her marriage will be).

…led her to become better at being a wife and mother, by discouraging her thrill-seeking, traveling and wasteful spending, and instead encouraging her focus on a STEM education, career and getting debt-free.

…led her to develop a Christian worldview in which she would understand the importance of marriage and children, and learn to sacrifice her own interests to love and care for others.

Was she interested in getting ready for marriage? No. She never chose those marriage-minded men. She didn’t want to be a wife. The men she chose were chosen for fun, for thrills, and to show off their outward appearance to her girlfriends.

So, who are the men in this group of marriage-minded men? How do you recognize them? Marriage-minded men are interested in marriage because they want to lead a home. They will have invested a lot of time learning how to protect others, how to provide, and how to debate and lead on moral and spiritual issues. Marriage-minded men see the marriage enterprise as a way of advancing the causes that they care about most. Women who really want to get married will recognize those men, and pursue those men. And they’ll do it early, so that they can invest in their husbands early and be young enough to have children.

12 thoughts on “Unmarried 35-year-old woman reflects on her adventurous life of fun, travel and serial cohabitation”

Radical feminism tells women they need to be on this path and if they choose traditional womanhood, they’re oppressed or lesser, and are poisoned against seeking out a good man. The lady of elegance and grace is now replaced by the “Nasty Woman” who thinks promiscuity and misandry is “empowering” and motherhood and marriage enslaving!https://aladyofreason.wordpress.com/2018/11/17/the-new-modern-woman/

Classical example of “I can have my cake and eat it too”. I see many of these delusional and vexing cougars, now damaged goods, who’ve exceeded their expiration date, but still believe they’re a 25 year old princess on a pedestal. They worshipped at the altar of credit card debt, shopping, self-entitlement, feminism, made-for-work jobs, pro-choice, avarice, self-actualization, atheism, and solipsism. They squandered their youth and best years on bad boys, but the kicker is, the good men they dismissed (often in a cavalier, degrading, and hostile manner) have since moved on. These men are now pursuing and/or are with younger women (often younger foreign women), or they’ve become MGTOW. The axiom is what goes around comes around. God’s justice be done.

I have spoken to women who played the field in college, and that’s exactly how they described their plan when I challenged ged them about how unfair it was to their future husbands that they were playing the field and devaluibg themselves as wives. And their response was that they intended have fun now, and have marriage later.

There just isn’t any wisdom about your sexual actions today affect your ability to do marriage well tomorrow. There isn’t any understanding of this in the culture, it’s all just having fun and blaming men when the reckless fun-seeking doesn’t result in the desired outcome. “It’s an accident! I’m a victim of bad men!”

WK, At age 60 and never married, I can say that the mating/dating thing is now in my rear view mirror. I think this whole dating thing is a waste of time and money. In my younger days, in former evangelical Protestantism, I attended church singles groups. Like most young men, I desired to find a decent mate with a Christian faith base at church. Sadly, even 30-40 years ago, hooking up, hypergamy, feminism, and the influences of popular culture influenced many of the women in these conservative churches and singles groups. As time went on, I noticed a transformation. You’d see about 8-10 professional type men in their 20s-30s, and about 20-30 women, also in their 20s-30s. About half the women were professional types. The other half were single mommies. Most of the single mommies (especially the more attractive ones) had dated and then married “unbelievers”(Chads and players), then quickly vanished from church life and attendance. They resurfaced a few years later, divorced, and with a brood of children in tow. The other women were waiting patiently for god to send them “Mr. Right”. The men, with a few exceptions, seemed to take faith seriously, and refused to date club girls, feminists, or single mommies with serial baby daddies. Most genuinely wanted to marry a Christian woman and have a family. But approaching these women for dates was a fool’s errand. I mean viscous and hateful responses. Case in point. I was 30 at the time, and I became friends with another guy who was 32. He’d just graduated from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary with an M-Div. He was working a secular job, and was looking for both a church to pastor, and a Christian wife. There was a 22 year old woman who’d just graduated from college and was starting a career. She was kind of cute, so the young seminarian asked the young lady out to a professional baseball game. As she was not attracted to the guy, not only did she crassly reject him, but she went straight to the pastor and elders claiming this poor seminarian was a “creeper” and had made her “uncomfortable”. The guy was hauled before the elders and harshly reprimanded. He tried to plead his case that he’d politely asked this young woman to go to a baseball game. But it fell on deaf ears. Frustrated, the young man left the church. I soon followed. Some of the young men eventually found mates outside the singles groups, did missionary dating, waited until they were older and found younger foreign mates, or went into MGTOW. I shudder to think of the shenanigans young Christian men are contending with today, especially in these feminized churches.

I’m praying that somehow she hears the good news of the Gospel. I love this verse…God is so incredible. Joel 2:25 “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you.”

I pray that she and many like her will hear the good news of the Gospel. I love this verse…Joel 2:25 “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you.”

Wisdom is of no value to many people. They just care about fun in the moment and will deal with any consequence later.
It is how they are in opposition to the Bible because the ideas on proverbs and the teachings are that the elders have knowledge and they are not stupid.

Now more than ever it is a prolonged life of being a rebellious teenager till far later in life

I don’t think she necessarily chose what made her feel good. I think she chose the life her parents, school teachers, and college profs set out for her. We raise our girls as boys now; with boys’ goals and expectations. Then we wonder why they don’t turn out like the women we knew. Kids don’t come of age in a vacuum.

He links to The Other McCain, who links to a Dennis Prager column, which has a warning from a 50-year-old career women to younger women. And she says:

I’m 50 years old with four college degrees. I was raised by a feminist mother with no father in the home. My mother told me get an education to the maximum level so that you can get out in the world, make a lot of money. And that’s the path I followed. I make adequate money. I don’t make a ton of money. But I do make enough to support my own household.

I want to tell women in their 20s: Do not follow the path that I followed. You are leading yourself to a life of loneliness. All of your friends will be getting married and having children, and you’re working to compete in the world, and what you’re doing is competing with men. Men don’t like competitors. Men want a partner. It took me until my late 40s to realize this. . . .

It’s hard to find a partner in your late 40s to date because you also start losing self-confidence about your looks, your body. It’s not the same as it was in your 20s. . . .

You sit home alone and you do nothing. I avoid my friends now that have children because I have nothing in common with them.
Somebody asked me the other day, “Why did you stay single and never have kids?” There’s answers: Because I was brainwashed by my mother into this. But it’s hard and it’s shameful to tell people, “I don’t know. I ran out of time.” . . .

I didn’t realize this until late in life. I want to tell women: Find someone in your 20s. That’s when you’re still very cute. That’s when you’re still amiable to working out problems with someone. It’s harder in your 50s, when you’ve lived alone, to compromise with someone, to have someone in your home and every little thing about them annoys you because you’re so used to being alone. It’s hard to undo that, so don’t do what I did. Find someone in your 20s.

WK, I predict that in the not so distant future, we are going to see an increase of suicides among older spinster career women, not to mention an increase of more mental health issues among them as well. Despite Hollywood, feminism, the media, and the entertainment industry attempting to indoctrinate our society that such women are somehow happy and fulfilled, or have the luxury of securing some older women/younger men/Demi Moore/Ashton Kirsher (looked how that played out) cougar hookups with scores of young thirsty millennial men lined up and vying for their affirmation and affection (unless it’s a paid arrangement, studies and real life clearly shows this is a feminist fantasy), the truth is, most all of them will be relegated to a sad end as described in Prager’s article.

WK, Still yet, another thing about this Prager article that jumps out at me is this older woman having 4 degrees (probably toilet paper degrees in social sciences, arts, and education). Was the juice really worth the squeeze? I see this with feminists. Social justice, their degrees, and (often life-time tenured made-for-work careers in HR, non-profits, social services, and education) are a substitute for Christianity. A few years back, I was watching a news report on the Occupy Wall Street protestors. Young women gave sob stories to the reporter that they had racked up tens-of-thousands of dollars in department store credit card debt and were unable to pay them back. Huh? No one held a gun to their heads and made them feed their avarice for materialism and junk. The icing on the cake was the young man who’d accrued over $30,000 in student loan debt, had a masters degree, and whined about not being able to get employed. Evidently, some social services soft-money/give-away funding in NYC had fallen through, and thus no made-for-work job for him. When asked what his masters degree was in, he replied, “Puppeteering”. Again, huh? Oh the myth of the “go into debt and get a worthless degree” beat into the heads of millions. As bad as any opioid epedemic ever was.